For anyone who has ever plowed through the puns and prose of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses—and even those who haven’t—Joseph Nugent and his students at Boston College have created a 21st-century tool to enrich the journey.
Walking Ulysses is a free, Web-based application that takes users on a detailed, virtual tour of Dublin, allowing them to follow in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s protagonist and the character whose name gave us Bloomsday, today’s June 16th holiday that celebrates Joyce’s life and work.
“We’re playing with time and space,” says Mr. Nugent, an assistant professor of English who has been teaching Ulysses for the past four years.
Users of the interactive tool can follow along either chapter by chapter or jump around, stream-of-consciousness style, as Bloom makes his way across Dublin. Click a chapter title: “The Lotus-Eaters.” Then move along through the streets of old Dublin, pausing to view an archival image of the city and listen to a passage from the novel. Then await instructions on where to go next.
Mr. Nugent, who emphasizes that the project is a work in progress, is creating the tool with technical help from Boston College’s Office of Instructional Design and eTeaching Services, as well as his students.
“So much of this has been pushed not by my innovativeness, but by the students themselves, who are so much more familiar with the technology of spatial thinking,” he says.
A native of Ireland, Mr. Nugent will be in Dublin in August, teaching a study-abroad course that crams a semester’s worth of Ulysses and Dubliners into three weeks.
“What we do is we go out every day and we actually trace the movement of the characters across the city with the text in our hands, and now with the iPhones,” he says.
He says that other professors and classes could do something similar to what he and his students have done with Ulysses, using Google Maps to plot the paths described in other novels or even accounts of historical battles.
“It allows them to explore the spatial details of the text in ways that couldn’t otherwise be done,” says Mr. Nugent.
But even the wonders of virtual technology can’t help users of Walking Ulysses overcome some of the obstacles of present-day Dublin. Some chapters, Mr. Nugent says, can no longer be walked “for reasons of progress.”
